Thursday, November 01, 2007

I'm so glad I'm not watching Meerkat Manor! I can't stand to see these adorable little critters (who sound just like my Saffron!) die. I don't know how the researchers working on Cambridge University's Kalahari Meerkat Project can stand it. They watch these little guys 24/7 for years and must be very attached -- as are fans who watch Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet.

Death Stalks the Meerkats Yet AgainBy EDWARD WYATTThe New York TimesPublished: October 27, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 26 — Another tragedy has befallen the meerkats.

Mozart, the troubled daughter of Flower, the late matriarch of the Whiskers clan on the popular Animal Planet series “Meerkat Manor,” died at the end of Friday’s episode; it was the second death to shake fans of the show’s lovable but hard-luck stars in a month.

After Flower’s death — from a snake bite — in the Sept. 28 episode, fans flooded the Internet with tributes in poem, picture and song. Early this week, as news of Mozart’s demise leaked out, similar tributes began to crop up online.

For the uninitiated, “Meerkat Manor” traces the lives of the members of several colonies of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa as they procreate, fight for territory and scarce resources and race around looking as cute as all get-out. The Whiskers clan is part of a 13-year study that was originated by Cambridge University and has been followed on camera by producers from Animal Planet for the last three years.

To the dismay of the show’s more fervent fans, the life span of a Kalahari meerkat turns out to be not much different from that of the average soap opera villain. Despite calls from some fans after the death of Flowers for the repeal of the Darwinian laws of the desert, the producers have no such refinements in mind.

But they did learn something from the uproar created after the first season, when Shakespeare, a lovable scamp of a meerkat, disappeared and was presumed to have died. The producers place radio collars on each family’s dominant female, the better to track the families’ movements, but because Shakespeare, a male, simply went missing, there was no visual evidence of his demise. When Flower succumbed to snakebite, the radio collar let producers track her movements closely and provide viewers with visible closure.

With Mozart, the cause of death was uncertain — it was likely that she fell prey one night to a passing jackal, the show’s narrator intones — but viewers are shown her lifeless body, if from a tasteful distance. Although one meerkat looks much like another, the producers mark each animal with a strategically placed spot of hair dye to tell them apart.

All is not lost, however. Fans of the show are likely to see more of Flower, and perhaps Mozart, in a feature film, “Queen of the Kalahari,” tentatively scheduled for release next year.